Wichita Roleplayers first Game Day

Whew, where have I been?

Just haven't had a lot of time for thinking about my own game stuff because I've been organizing the Wichita_Roleplayers first Game Day. Which was held Saturday… I pretty much spent 12 hours on my feet at one of our local game stores so a bunch of other people could play roleplaying games while I watched. Or something like that.

It came off rather well… our biggest issue was noise and attracting too many players. We had two four-hour slots, with two games in each slot. My fear was not getting enough people to fill the games. In the first slot, my nerves were settled when the Buffy game got a comfortable five players (even if two of the players were direct family to the GM), and the D&D game ended up with seven in the end. This gave me hope for slot two.

Until an entire gaming group, seven people, walked in at two o'clock, wanting to sign up for the Ravenloft game that started at four. Aiee! I'd already had one pre-registration for that game, and another interested party. Even though the GM said she could handle ten (10!) players, I tend to think more than five in a convention game, even if they can be "handled," really degrades the experience for the players. All but one of the seven came back at four, and two of those jumped ship for the World of Darkness game. Even so, we ended up with eight players in each of the games, and turned people away from one of them because the GM (rightly) wouldn't take any more.

Things would have been different if that one guy in the group of seven had never found our flyer, but we still would have had five or six players in each game. I would have liked to have had a third game for that slot, but never found a "backup" GM… someone ready to run a game but not offered unless we got a large number of players. We'll have to be sure to have such for the next one.

For the next one, we're going to move to a neutral location… being in a game store really limited our ability to promote in other game stores, and severely limits our sponsorship options. Besides that, I think we've already outgrown the game store… we're already bumping elbows with the miniatures gamers. I'm just afraid that moving away from the game store and losing the walk-in traffic is going to cut back on our numbers.

I think I'm going to talk to Judd on the Sons of Kryos podcast about how he manages the Ithaca Gamers Get-Your-Geek-On-a-Thon, which is much the same. I know they meet in a "neutral" location. Might be able to put together a guide to running game-days and mini-cons, or talk about it on the podcast. I wouldn't mind being a guest on SoK… I don't have a lot of experience, but my mistakes are all fresh in my mind. :)